Darkroom, my favorite iOS photo-editing app, just became even more useful. The latest 4.1 update adds a Photos editing extension, a new share extension, drag and drop, and Files app support.
Problem: You want to send a bunch of photos, or maybe a couple of big PDFs, to a client/friend/family member. The trouble is that the files are too big. Say your photos total 50MB. That’s way too much for email.
The old solutions: Split the photos up and send smaller emails. That’s a real pain for you and for the recipient. What about Dropbox? Sure, but then you have to copy the files to Dropbox, and get a link. Do you even have the Dropbox app on your iPhone?
What about WeTransfer? Sure. Just try to enjoy waiting for the upload.
The fix: MailDrop. Just compose your too-big email as usual, and let MailDrop take care of it.
I got sick of having to tap a zillion buttons just to iMessage a photo to somebody, so I made a shortcut that lets me tap an icon on my Home screen, and sends my latest photo automatically to a preselected friend.
That’s it. You tap it, and the shortcut grabs the last photo you shot, and sends it. If that sounds like something you want, check it out.
Hyperspektiv is one of my favorite photo apps from the past few years. Instead of screwing with your digital photos to make them look like olde timey film photos, it screws with your digital photos to make them look crazy and awesome. It’s a glitch-style filter app, and it pretty much decimates your images, turning them into incredible video clips, and — now — still photos.
Hyperspektiv 2.0 is out, and it cranks up the heat on the image-mangling burner to H-O-T.
Wait, what? Why would you want to back up your iCloud Photo Library? Apple takes care of that, right? After all, the clue is in the name — the library is stored in iCloud.
Not so fast. That’s true, but what if something screws up at Apple’s end? What if you lose access to your iCloud account? What if, what if, what if? In most cases, you’ll be fine, but being a good computer nerd, you probably understand the value of redundant backups. So today we’ll see how to make sure all your images are safely stored. Just in case.
The first iOS update of the year is finally ready for the masses.
Apple is releasing iOS 12.1.3 today, bringing a number of bug fixes and performance improvements to the iPhone and iPad. iOS 12.1.3 is a minor update and doesn’t contain any big UI changes or new features, but it resolves some important issues with CarPlay, iMessage, Photos and the iPad Pro.
Adobe’s Lightroom, perhaps the best photo-editing app on iOS, now supports shortcuts. That is, it supports one shortcut, letting you load photo into it from the camera roll, or any other place your find images in iOS.
Wouldn’t a simple Open In… option suffice? Perhaps, but by adding just one simple shortcut, Adobe has also added quite a few powerful possibilities.
The iPhone comes with some cool dynamic wallpapers — they’re the ones where blobs of color float around the screen like wax in a lava lamp. But did you know you can create your own Dynamic Wallpaper using your own Live Photos?
You can — and it’s super-easy.
Did you know that every photo you send via iMessage, or other messaging services like WhatsApp, contains all that photo’s location data? If you snap a picture in your home, anyone who’s receives that photo will be able to see where you took it on a map.
The same goes for uploading images to online auction sites, or internet forums. The good news is that it’s easy to sanitize your images with Shortcuts.
The iPhone XS has an amazing camera, and the best part of that camera is the Depth Control feature, which lets you adjust the background blur after you take the photo.
This is a powerful feature, but to get the most out of it, you might want to check out these tips and tricks on using Depth Control on iPhone XS.
You’ve been able to import photos into an iPad ever since the first iPad launched. You had to buy a Camera Connection Kit to do it, which at the time consisted of two 30-pin Dock connectors, one with a USB-A port for hooking up cameras and CF readers, the other with an SD card slot. Since then, imports have gotten faster, and better. And the biggest difference with the 2018 iPad Pro is that now you can use any old USB-C card reader or hub to do the importing. Let’s see how it works.
iOS 12 has a great new camera filter: Comic Book. It turns your selfies and photos into pretty convincing pen-and-ink-style drawings, complete with flat blocks of color. It even works with Animoji selfies.
But hold on one second. You won’t find this filter in your iPhone’s Camera app, or even in the Photos app. Instead, you need to fire up the Messages app and use the camera there.
For many people, the new “For You” tab in Apple’s Photos app could become the default front page for their pictures. The new feature in iOS 12 gathers everything you care about — recent pictures, sharing activity, memories and something called “Featured Photos” — into one convenient spot.
Let’s check out the Photos For You tab and see what you can do with it.
In iOS 11 and earlier, importing photos from a camera to your iPad photo library was always a bit clunky. You plugged the SD card in using the Lightning SD card reader, or hooked up the camera to a USB adapter, and then the Photos import took over your entire screen.
Also, all the images you imported wound up dumped right into your main photo library, leaving you to manually select them later if you wanted to add them to albums.
In iOS 12, Apple improved all of this. Let’s take a look at the great new photo import features in iOS 12.
iOS 12 adds a great new feature in the Photos app. Now, when you share a photo, you can choose to copy a link to that photo, and share that instead. This is a lot like sharing a file from Dropbox. You can even copy a link to a whole slew of files and share them by sending a single URL.
Shared photos are stored in iCloud, and the link is accessible to anyone that has it, for up to a month. Let’s see how it works.
Photos already has a pretty decent search function on iOS 11. Thanks to Apple’s machine-learning tech, and AI categorization, you can search for thousands of “scenes.” These include the places you took the photo, but also anything from abacus to zucchini, people in the images, and times the images were taken.
This has gotten even better in iOS 12. You can still search on many thousands of categories and keywords, but now you can combine searches. For instance, you could search for several different people, and see photos only containing them all. OR you can combine search terms like Christmas, Food, and 2015, for instance. Let’s take a look.
You’ve long been able to take photos inside the Messages app on your iPhone, sending pictures directly into a conversations without saving them to your camera roll first. And you’ve also been able to grab photos from your library. But in iOS 12, both of these features are way better. Especially the camera. Not only does it ditch the stupid thumbnail-sized camera view, but you get access to some awesome new filters, and even AR stickers. Let’s take a look.
Siri is useless for a lot of things, but when it works, it can be a real timesaver. For instance, you can use Siri to search for photos in your iPhone or iPad photo library. Say something like, “Hey Siri, show me photos of clowns,” and it’ll do just that, opening the Photos app, switching to the search tab, and entering the search term “clowns” for you.
Even if you’re sitting looking at the search tab in the Photos app already, Siri is still way easier to use for search than manually tapping something into the search field, deleting the previous search, and typing a new one.
And that’s just the beginning.
How do you send a photo to several of your family members? Do you compose a group message, adding all their various addresses and phone numbers manually? Do you have several existing threads, each with a different combo of family members?
Today, we’re going to see a much easier way to send a photo to multiple recipients using Siri Shortcuts (or Apple’s Workflow app). It’s so simple that it should be built in to the iPhone.
Did you know that you can hide photos in your iPhone’s Photos library? This lets you keep photographs away from prying eyes, while still having access to them yourself. And — ironically — it also makes it very easy to find all the embarrassing/explicit photos on somebody else’s iPhone.
The second public beta of Apple’s huge iOS 12 updates has already arrived.
After seeding iOS 12 beta 3 to developers earlier this week, Apple just dropped iOS 12 public beta 2, allowing everyone to try the new UI tweaks and performance enhancements.
With so much to digest during Apple’s big WWDC keynote on Monday, it was easy to miss some of the finer details.
You might be aware of every new feature coming to iOS 12 this fall. You might have memorized the changes to macOS, too. But did you know that more than 20 million people are now building apps for Apple devices, or that 10 billion Siri requests are processed every month?
Here are some fascinating numbers you probably missed during WWDC.
Forget about stressful searches for photos on your loaded iPhone camera roll. The Photos app will be smarter in iOS 12.
Coming to Photos will be features that recognize objects, scenes and people, and make suggestions even before you finish typing your search.
This post is presented by Fat Cat Software, maker of PowerPhotos.
If there’s one thing photo libraries do, it’s grow. And as they increase in size, they also become harder to organize. Duplicates creep in, folders get mixed up, and the size can easily get out of control. But a Mac app called PowerPhotos offers new moves for managing your digital photo library.
Pulling your photos off of Instagram just got a lot easier.
Instagram revealed today that it is finally starting to roll out a new tool that lets any Instagram user retrieve all of the photos, videos, comments, likes and other data stored on Instagram’s servers.
Get your data by following these steps: